In this study, we explore oral and written work (plays and rap songs) of students in a sixth‐grade all African‐American urban science class to reveal ways affective and social aspects are intertwined with students' cognition. We interpret students' work in terms of the meeting of various genres brought by the students and teachers to the classroom. Students bring youth genres, classroom genres that they have constructed from previous schooling, and perhaps their own science genres. Teachers bring their favored classroom and science genres. We show how students' affective reactions were an integral part of their constructed scientific knowledge. Their knowledge building emerged as a social process involving a range of transactions among students and between students and teacher, some transactions being relatively smooth and others having more friction. Along with their developing science genre, students portrayed elements of classroom genres that did not exist in the classroom genre that the teacher sought to bring to the class. Students' work offered us a glimpse of students' interpretations of gender dynamics in their classrooms. Gender also was related to the particular ways that students in that class included disagreement in their developing science genre. © 2002 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Res Sci Teach 39: 579–605, 2002
Preschooler's use of counting in many-to-one situations was assessed in 2 tasks. Children's performances on these tasks demonstrate that, given a perceptually available set of dolls, children can use number words to determine the quantity of a hidden or nonexistent set of items in a known ratio to the present set (2 or 3 items for each doll). Children's appropriate use of counting in these many-toone situations develops during the period from 4 to 5' /2 years old. The task demands and the strategies children used in these tasks are discussed. Piaget (1952) emphasized the importance of distinguishing between children's use of number words and their understanding of the concept of number. From the failure of young children on his conservation task, Piaget concluded that, "For them [young children at Stage II], there is a quantitative equivalence between two sets when there is a one-to-one correspondence, but this correspondence is perceptual, or intuitive, thus involving a perceived contact between the corresponding elements. . . . [O]nce the contact is no longer perceived, the correspondence ceases to exist for the child [italics added]" (p. 48).Thus, Piaget claimed that young children's understanding of a one-to-one correspondence is limited to situations in which that correspondence is perceptually available to the children. Subsequently, children's understanding of number, as well as the numerical understanding indicated by children's use of number words, has been the subject of debate, much of it centered around whether children have a concept of cardinality or whether they use rote rules (
Constructivist theory must choose between the hypothesis that felt perturbation drives cognitive development (the priority of felt perturbation) and the hypothesis that the particular process that eventually produces new cognitive structures first produces felt perturbation (the continuity of process). There is ambivalence in Piagetian theory regarding this choice. The prevalent account of constructivist theory adopts the priority of felt perturbation. However, on occasion Piaget has explicitly rejected it, simultaneously endorsing the continuity of process. First, I explicate and support this latter position, arguing that felt perturbation emerges after the construction of a new cognitive structure has already begun. Next, I discuss the broader significance of rejecting the priority of felt perturbation in terms of a distinction between two types of theory of effective change, labeled Lamarckian and Darwinian in analogy with familiar theories of evolutionary change. Rejecting the priority of felt perturbation allows the development of a Darwinian perspective. In turn, the Darwinian perspective offers advantages for elaborating the analogy Piaget proposed between consciousness and the relation of form and content.
The premise of this article is that cognitive development involves both conceptual and semiotic achievements. From this perspective, the authors emphasize the distinctness of the semiotic issues and develop a differentiated appreciation of semiotic aspects of cognition, particularly in the field of elementary mathematical cognition. The authors provide semiotic analyses of the differences between counting, adding, and multiplying and of the conventional place-value sign system. The authors introduce the concept of the field of reference of a sign, the differentiation of the field into foreground and background, and the dynamics within the field of reference. Finally, the authors relate these ideas to the dynamics between two dimensions of semiotic relations: the sign-referent dimension and the sign-sign dimension.
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